WT Forums

Pentagon Takes Major Step Toward Battlespace System Harmonization

Family of Operational Pictures is a Key Element of Precision Engagement

By RICHARD C. BARNARD
Editor in Chief

The television pictures on the nightly news of precision munitions dropped by U.S. aircraft and landing precisely on target time after time illustrate one aspect of the technological superiority of U.S. military forces. Unmanned aircraft now launch their own robots for specialized tasks; entire fleets of unmanned air and ground vehicles will be on U.S. front lines in the near future; and the Tomahawk cruise missile, famous for its reliability and accuracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, is now reprogrammable in flight to attack targets on demand, much like today’s fighter aircraft.

However, the technological prowess enjoyed by American military forces is accompanied by a dark element of uncertainty. U.S. tactical units can be the victims of their own sophisticated systems, and the consequences sometimes are tragic. In March 2001, a Navy F/A-18C dropped three 500-pound bombs on a manned observation post, killing five Americans and one New Zealander during a nighttime exercise at the al Udairi Range in Kuwait. In 1994, two Air Force F-15s shot down two Army Black Hawk helicopters during operations in northern Iraq.

The root cause of these mishaps was that the aircraft and related ground controllers had different electronic “pictures” of what was going on in their areas of operations, according to a 2001 paper by Louis S. Metzger and Col. Donald R. Erbschloe, then-Air Force chief scientist and his assistant, respectively.

Fratricide is but one of the problems created by the wide variety of operational pictures in use by the military services. The number and complexity of systems that create images on the screens in aircraft cockpits, missile batteries and combat control centers diminishes service interoperability, said Robin L. Quinlan, deputy director for joint force integration in the Pentagon’s acquisition, technology and logistics office.

In a Sea Power interview, she said the services’ diverse operational picture systems together constitute poor use of resources and can adversely affect decision-making during combat. Assessments of tracking data show that several sensors focused on a few enemy aircraft can generate dozens of “targets” on the combat screens of missile batteries and aircraft. In some instances, the targets even changed their identification from enemy to friend to neutral.

What is needed, she said, is a coherent picture of the battle area with only one track per target, regardless of the number of sensors in play. The picture has to be continuous, “so that the latlong [latitude and longitude reading] on a target from my vantage point is the same as from yours,” she said.

The military’s coil of combat pictures also could hamper the services’ ability to achieve a top Pentagon goal: speeding up the performance of tactical units in precision engagement, the series of tasks from target detection to assessment and attack. Key Pentagon officials, such as Vitalij Garber, director for system integration, maintain that improving the interoperability of the operational pictures is an essential element of precision engagement.

Taming the Tangled Web of Systems

That task will be huge. The services have fielded numerous systems that generate pictures of a battle area for tasks such as target identification and tracking, situational awareness and management of military operations. These include the Advanced Field Artillery Tactical Data System that prioritizes target assignments to maximize the use of an array of shooters such as mortars, artillery and naval gunfire. There is also the Joint Tactical Information Distribution System to foster tactical interoperability and situational awareness by all services. The Air Defense Systems Integrator fetches and collates data from satellites, radars and other systems to generate a view of air operations.

One of the largest items on the Pentagon list of systems to tame: the Global Command and Control System (GCCS), which links other systems together and is used to plan, execute and manage military operations. It is massive and comprises no less than four subsystems. Among them is a maritime component — GCCS-M — that itself integrates data from more than 80 command-and-control systems.

In 1999, the Defense Department’s System Integration office tallied 30 major existing or planned systems that create operational pictures, and there “was $36 billion for those 30 systems tied up in the budget,” Quinlan said. That figure quickly grew to $47 billion, “and that worried us.”

To restrain costs and foster harmony, Garber, Quinlan and others are creating the Family of Interoperable Operational Pictures (FIOP). It is not an additional system, but an effort to integrate the operational pictures across service lines and among air, ground and naval forces.

The Air Force is executive agent for this complex undertaking, while the interoperability work and inclusion of warfighter requirements went early this year to the Joint Forces Command (JFCOM). The FIOP effort is a key test of the Pentagon’s determination to create joint integrated architectures, or blueprints, for the enhancement of military capabilities using existing systems. It is one of several tactics the Defense Department is using to steer the services away from developing stovepiped weapons and sensors. The Pentagon also wants to “converge,” or terminate, some operational pictures to simplify the monumental job given to the experts now responsible for FIOP.

Michael Winslow, deputy director of JFCOM’s system of systems division, said his department’s work has so far “been oriented around tasks to integrate” and improve the interoperability of current systems to achieve a better fusion of existing databases and cultivate the creation of better “tactical and operational pictures.” JFCOM chose to start with the GCCS. Illustrative of the desperate need for FIOP is that GCCS-M is not interoperable with the Army element, GCCS-A.

The essential task of Winslow and his colleagues is to strive for a standard reference frame for conveying information about the location of elements in a battle area. In effect, they create a software template for use by computer programs in a network of systems. Using the same template, military sensors and the operational pictures they generate will then employ the same descriptors and thus provide continuous and cohesive — rather than conflicting — pictures of the battle area. Or so the theory goes.

Unclear Definition of Single Picture

But Winslow and other FIOP proponents agree the process of creating a genuine family of operational pictures will be long and difficult. The number, complexity and massive size of the systems envisioned as family members make the job monumental.

Also, there are significant differences between systems designers and other experts about how their operational pictures will perform. Some speak of a coherent view of the battlespace for all involved in a conflict. In a January statement about the Navy’s decision to join the Single Integrated Air Picture program, for example, the Naval Sea Systems Command said that “commanders, pilots and even infantrymen will share a single tactical picture, showing friendly and enemy units on land, sea and in the air.”

Howard Harmatz, director of JFCOM’s system of systems office, said there is no current consensus on the word “picture,” and “I think it creates a false impression.”

Winslow, his deputy, said the term “coherent view of the battle area means many things to many people.” He foresees “a never-ending battle” regarding what constitutes a coherent picture of the battle area — or a slice of it — for warfighters at various levels.

Quinlan said, “It’s not really the same picture.” For example, the term single integrated picture “means one track per target. It doesn’t mean one picture for all. It means … the [available data is] clear, continuous and coherent.”

Harmatz said there is more agreement among experts on FIOP’s long-term goal. “If a soldier at the squad level needs to understand the larger picture, he could get it scoped out for him.” Operational pictures of the future will be scalable, based on the needs of the user, “that’s the approach we are looking at.”

Forward Progress of FIOP

Meanwhile, JFCOM has achieved some early successes with FIOP. Chief among them has been the ongoing cooperation between the Army and Marine Corps that will lead to the termination of one system and agreement to the joint use of another. The Army will transition from its Maneuver Control System in favor of the Marine Corps Command and Control Personal Computer, for situational awareness information to brigade units and above. In addition, the two services tentatively have agreed to use the Army’s Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade-and-Below for smaller units, once security issues are resolved.

Harmatz said the Army/Marine Corps cooperation is a significant step toward achievement of FIOP’s long-term goal of facilitating a family of operational pictures that will be interoperable, horizontally and vertically, across service lines and throughout the tactical echelons. To achieve that end, JFCOM is involved in a joint service effort to create several networking tools, as elements of FIOP, to nurture interoperability of a wide variety of weapon systems and operational pictures.

First is the Single Integrated Air Picture (SIAP), which is being crafted for the air warfare domain. Its data fusion capabilities would enable the Army’s Patriot air-defense missile to use information from a Navy F/A-18E/F fighter, for example, or an Air Force Airborne Warning and Control System plane.

Quinlan called the jointly produced SIAP “the lead sled dog” in the FIOP harness. Funded at $964 million in budget years 2004-09, initial delivery of the first air picture component is scheduled in September 2005.

Next on the schedule is a technological cousin of the SIAP called SIGP, or Single Integrated Ground Picture, which is to foster concerted operations by sensors and operational pictures of the Marine Corps and Army. The recent Marine Corps/Army deal provides the forces “with a near-term SIGP,” said Harmatz.

JFCOM has “some minimal dollars” for exploratory work and perhaps a concept of operations study. The Navy is expected to rely for several years on its GCCS-M as it works with JFCOM and other organizations to develop a Joint Command and Control System.

An overarching lesson of the imbroglio with the Pentagon’s numerous operational picture systems is that the Defense Department has to fund objectives such as joint interoperability. “There is a history in the department of not funding to the objectives,” said Quinlan. “And if you don’t fund to the objectives, interoperability falls by the wayside.”


Edited by - viperttb on Jul 11 2004 12:05 PM